I posted awhile back. Things are going very well for me. Much better than they were before. Everyone applauds my dps.

I was wondering, is there a website or forum post out there, or does your simulation craft show what kind of dps numbers you should be getting at a certain ilvl?

I'm curious if I should be doing better. I am sure I have a lot to learn and even figured out a reason why my dps was so poor before; my internet connection. My provider was having issues with their equipment and it was tanking my dps because my latency was so high. My connection is as good as it's going to get in a rural area now.

My ilvl is 490. In raids I am never under 70k to 75k in any fight. I am now up on the top'ish area (1 or 2 - sometimes 3 if it's a meh fight for us) of the dps charts instead of the bottom. Some fights of course are amazingly higher than others. Is that good, or can it be improved upon drastically?

I'm going to start posting our fights to world of logs and keep working on my technique.

btw Thank you for all of your help before and now. Between the better latency, the ovale script and bad kitty I am loving this game so much more now.

With out an armory link or a log its harder to tell. Any site that will offer a DPS output figure for your ilvl is only doing so through a simulator. That is a patchwork fight with perfect execution. Best thing you can do is exactly what you are doing. Look to improve and keep track of your performance in the logs. If you post em up we can have a look.

My rule of thumb for a patchwerk fight is 80k dps at ilvl 470, then add 1.5k dps per ilvl you have above that. eg. ilvl 500 druid should do ~125k dps. Simulationcraft always seems to undervalue my dps for whatever reason (keeps telling me I should be around 115-120k dps when I was at 140 in actuality).

That seems like a bit much to me, I would say an item level 500 character should be around 117.5k-120k, and that's assuming a 504 weapon, since there's really no reason you shouldn't have one. There's a difference between ideal conditions played perfectly and average conditions played perfectly.

Your best Gara'jal parse (which I assume is what you are referencing) was a 4 minute 25 second kill and had a 48.5% filler crit rate, both of which are considerably above average conditions, and you still only pulled 140.7k. A random fight duration with average RNG would be considerably lower than 140k.

aggixx wrote:I would say an item level 500 character should be around 117.5k-120k, and that's assuming a 504 weapon, since there's really no reason you shouldn't have one.

Except, I don't, guess this sha gem is never getting used, and I run a 25 man raiding guild <insert useless explicatives here>. Similarly one of my hunters JUST finally upgraded out of his blue weapon. RNG really sucks when it comes to these low drop rate, niche-weapons. I can still parse here or there with my 489 weapon but my 500 iLvL feels useless to me. I wish I could regularly see 117.5-120k dps but that feels awfully high to me unless we're talking elegon or some other gimmick fight. I mean honestly I would consider 100k on Feng normal (closest we really have to patchwerk) to be amazing and I suspect would parse top 20.

Your best Gara'jal parse (which I assume is what you are referencing) was a 4 minute 25 second kill and had a 48.5% filler crit rate, both of which are considerably above average conditions, and you still only pulled 140.7k. A random fight duration with average RNG would be considerably lower than 140k.

I think I was also only ilvl 505 or so at that time (haven't raided msv on my druid in a while - we're mostly gearing alts now), so slightly lucky, sure, but heck, that's why it's my "rule of thumb" and not a hard law, especially when you take into consideration how ilvl isn't the best metric of gear quality (476 Xuen -> 517 terror = 3 ilvls upgrade on char sheet and like ~1k dps? up).

In the absence of accurate simulation - as an aside, I really do appreciate everyone's hard work, but it just sadly isn't overall dps accurate - that's basically what I use for all of my characters and it gets me to within ballpark figures at least. For example, last week I took my ilvl 494 monk (brewmaster gem/reforging) and hit 98k on garajal, which I would extrapolate to around 105k/110k with the right gear mods. Checking (494-470)*1.5 + 80 = 116 means I'm playing 5-10% below my potential, which is pretty easy to believe since I've had maybe 3 hours of raid exp total as a windwalker. Anyway, just showing how I use it.

Edit: I'm sure someone out there could come up with a far more scientifically accurate baseline ilvl 470 value and a better scalar than my napkin math/experience, I just use 80 and 1.5 for simplicity and it's been more or less spot on for me, or at least that's what I feel it's like.

Last edited by kaiadam on Wed Feb 13, 2013 6:01 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Well, it isn't necessarily that SimC isn't accurate (although it almost definitely does have bugs) but a player will always be able to adapt to a situation more than a sim will be able to, and that's going to net a couple thousand DPS easily.The goal of simulationcraft isn't for it to be 100% perfectly accurate, but for players to be able to use it get information that allows them to better their play and their character. Naturally, increasing the accuracy of the results the sim achieves will aid that but it's not realistic to assume the sim is perfect.

And just to be clear I wasn't trying to bash your formula or anything, I just personally think it's a tad off. Maybe you just know something I don't

feralminded wrote:Except, I don't, guess this sha gem is never getting used, and I run a 25 man raiding guild <insert useless explicatives here>. Similarly one of my hunters JUST finally upgraded out of his blue weapon. RNG really sucks when it comes to these low drop rate, niche-weapons. I can still parse here or there with my 489 weapon but my 500 iLvL feels useless to me. I wish I could regularly see 117.5-120k dps but that feels awfully high to me unless we're talking elegon or some other gimmick fight. I mean honestly I would consider 100k on Feng normal (closest we really have to patchwerk) to be amazing and I suspect would parse top 20.

Ok fair enough, the one reason you wouldn't have one is RNG, I didn't really consider that. Keep in mind that feral is a very complex spec, it might not be hard to play, but it definitely is not easy to master. Although the original question was "where should my DPS be at a given item level", kaiadam and I are talking about the max potential in DPS (as we understand it now) for your item level. I would tend to believe there are very few ferals who can frequently get to that theoretical max and even then it becomes a struggle of being able to reach it as consistently as possible.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that if you can get near these figures consistently, even if you're not quite there, you're already doing really well.

Thanks for the info everyone. I did 114k on Elegon the other night and was pretty happy with that. I can remember before I found this site I was upset because I couldn't get more than 50k on that fight.

This is one of the reasons why I try to stay away from discussions that are titled something like 'how is my dps?' because all I will tell them is either I feel they could do more or I feel they are doing okay. Knowing specifically their numbers they should pull is such a difficult thing to determine since there really isn't a Patchwerk type fight anymore. Even Gara'jal, the closest you can get to a Patchwerk fight, has you switch to the spirit realm which can screw over logging and you end up with buffs/killing adds. So even if I were able to sit on something and attack it for 5 straight minutes I honestly don't even know what dps I would do (nor do I honestly pay attention to what dps I do and what my item level was at the time of a kill).

Not only that but you add in roles you may or may not have to perform and it's completely different for each person (yay for having to be on 100% unstable sha duty for tsulong ).

Either way, grats OP on the bump in the dps! Good to hear the resources here have been helpful.

Since it seemed excessive to create new thread, I'll just post my concerns here. Last night My guild and I started on Heart of Fear (late I know). We downed Zor'loc and gave Ta'yak few good trys and I'm really struggling to get decent numbers out.

Ta'yak is an extremely shitty fight to use as DPS benchmark. Until you become familiar with the way the boss (and the tanks) move around, you'll spend half of the time seeing "You must be behind your target.". It's also problematic to log, when the boss goes invisible it generates no log messages, so the aura uptime calculation can be wrong.

BTW I see you're using SotF, and from the lack of NV and DoC I'm assuming you use HotW. Why didn't you abuse it in p2 to keep yourself (and the raid) alive? HotW tranq brings an entire 10-man group from half health to full, and in p2 if you get stuck in a tornado you can keep yourself alive with the boosted Rejuv. Symbiosis on a SP is also good, they get a semi-decent tranq and you have dispersion, which gets you through 1/2 of the room taking almost 0 damage.

Helistar wrote:BTW I see you're using SotF, and from the lack of NV and DoC I'm assuming you use HotW. Why didn't you abuse it in p2 to keep yourself (and the raid) alive? HotW tranq brings an entire 10-man group from half health to full, and in p2 if you get stuck in a tornado you can keep yourself alive with the boosted Rejuv. Symbiosis on a SP is also good, they get a semi-decent tranq and you have dispersion, which gets you through 1/2 of the room taking almost 0 damage.

Symbiosis was on Shadowpriest (perhaps on that try I forgot to use it) and also the reason for not using Hotw is that we only broke into p2 once and that point it was utter chaos on vent, so by the time we started to run towards the boss, half the raid was dead. I was gonna use it, when we reach boss, but apparently using it before would have been more beneficial, thanks for noticing that.

Is there a any point using Hotw as a dps increase on that fight or is staying in catform more reasonable? Most likely during p2 it would be better for healers if I back them up I guess.

Practice makes perfect as they say, so next time I'll improve and be smarter.

The best time to use HotW tanq is right as the raid is droped from tornados at the start of P2. Everyone will be low from the tornados, everyone is taking massive damage, and as soon as the raid moves all of the healers will be reduced in effectivness by having to heal on the move. Have the raid pause for just a few seconds to blow the tranq and then move as a group. If some people get ahead of everyone they won't be in range of the healers and will die for sure. If you have a warlock you can use their gateways to cut the run distance down to about half. Make sure the healers get first crack at it so they can stand and heal again.

I use a different timing, and blow HotW/tranq after the first "run". We wait 5 seconds before running, so Tranq is too long. And I abuse sprint go get to the other side first, this allows me to be ready and have the tranq up as people arrive, relieving a lot of the pressure on the heals (who are still running).After tranq I check the lifebars: high -> go back to cat form, do DPS, low -> blanket-rejuv the raid.I guess that choosing the right approach involves looking at when exactly your healers are having trouble. In any case, I find that having Dispersion/Divine shield for one trip and SI (ideally, unglyphed) for another one is the best damage-reduction solution.